Budapest to Cluj Napoca

Yesterday we took it easy, waking up at around 11am with plans to tour Budapest for a bit and then head off to Romania. At the hostel we were staying, we were offered a cheap laundry service which we agreed to take based on the promise that our clothes would be given back to us by 10am.

Needless to say, we woke up, went to pick up our clothes only to find them all wet and dispersed in hangers so they can air-dry. We told them we were in a hurry to get on the road again and asked if they could put our stuff in the drier. They had no idea what we were talking about. After trying to explain to them what a drier was, we did some Google magic only to find the following phrase “there is no such thing as a laundromat in Budapest”. They signaled us to a place near the Basilica where they might help us. A quick trip around the city with hopes of getting our clothes dried ended up in a battle with an “electric condenser” so we decided to lay our our clothes in the car and hit the road. It’s was a pretty damp ride.

Before leaving Budapest we did get to do some sightseeing and ran into many other Mongol Rally teams. All other teams were in good spirits and with plans of hitting the beach party by the Black Sea organized by The Paramongols, so that’s where we’re now headed, to Vama Veche.

Unfortunately, while Enrique and Andrés were dealing with the laundry, I was fixing up our electrical system and had to declare “La Cucaracha” horn dead – after all those hours of fun, our little horn died… RIP.

Romania
We crossed into Romania and were stopped at the border for quite some time. The guards were pretty friendly and were obviously fans of Chicharito. Unfortunately we did lose about an hour there. Furthermore, Romania was our second time zone crossing, so we lost another hour. It was quickly getting dark and we still had a long ways to go.

Not after long, the sun was down and we noticed that our dipped headlights weren’t working, which made it impossible to drive through the countryside. We decided to turn around and stop at a gas station at the border town we had just left. We first suspected a broken fuse, but close inspection of all of them proved us wrong — all fuses were working fine. Since both of our lights were broken, we thought it could be a broken relay, which are difficult to debug. Slowly we worked our way around the electrical system for the headlamps and dipped headlights, which none of us had ever touched. We nailed it down to the light bulbs and were pleased for having bought a replacement set of lights at Halfords in the UK. Well, I took the burnt-out bulb only to find that we didn’t have proper replacements.

It was here that our saviour, Florin (the attendant at the gas station), stepped in by providing exact replacements. After tedious fiddling with the lamps, we finally replaced the lamps and had a new friend, which didn’t speak a word of English, Spanish, or German. Florin was really curious of our adventure and with lots of signs and mostly Spanish (Romanian is remarkably similar to Spanish), we were able to communicate with him what we were doing. We pulled out our maps and he gave us some good driving tips for getting around Romania. He offered us free coffee for our drive and set us off into the wild!

We originally had planned to make it all the way to Târgu Mure?, but decided to stop short at Cluj Napoca, which was about 120 km away. About an hour into the drive, our temperature gauge dropped to zero and the engine light came on – damn. We slowed down and were shortly stopped by the Policy afterwards. Enrique was driving and we were told we broke several laws:

• Speed Limit was 50km/h, we were doing about 65km/h
• Overtaking in a solid line, we had overtaken a slow car while the line was dashed
• Driving with a non Romanian license, we obviously did break this one, but it sounds like that was a made up law

To this point we have no idea what exactly happened, but we were let go with just a warning… After about 15km we reached the first hotel and went straight to bed — not before taking all of our damp clothes from the car and dispersing them all over the room.

Today we are planning on taking the car to a Fiat agency, buy some more camping supplies, head off to the Transf?g?r??an (featured in Top Gear, and make it all the way to Vama Veche for the Beach Party.

Will we make it? Stay tuned.